AMD's $55 Athlon 200GE Overclocked to 3.9 GHz With New MSI BIOS

YouTuber TechEpiphany posted a video on Thursday of an overclocked Athlon 200GE, which is surprising because this $55 dual-core, four-thread processor wasn't originally overclockable. The Athlon 200GE comes with a locked multiplier, making it the only non-overclockable, Zen-based model in AMD's fleet. In fact, as a low-end model, it doesn't even support AMD's Precision Boost algorithms that improve performance, instead operating at a static 3.2 GHz overclock. We followed up with our own testing and currently have the chip running at 3.9 GHz. We'll update this post as the benchmarks roll off the test system.

TechEpiphany pushed its processor up to 3.8 GHz. Apparently, the latest MSI BIOS that supports the AGESA 1.0.0.6 firmware has inadvertently unlocked the multiplier on the processor. We followed up with our own testing and have the processor at 3.9 GHz with a 1.4 V vCore and 1.15 SoC voltage. Unfortunately, we can't overclock the memory beyond the supported DDR4-2667.

TechEpiphany used an MSI B360M Gaming Pro motherboard with the AGESA 1.0.0.6 BIOS, while we were able to recreate the same conditions with an MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC motherboard.

AMD's release of the Athlon 200GE earlier this year marked the company's first Zen-based processor to tackle the sub-$100 processor market. That's an important step for AMD because Intel typically dominates this high-volume segment of the market with its Pentium processors. We aren't sure if AMD has intentionally unlocked the Athlon 200GE's multiplier, thus enabling overclocking, or if this is a mistake on MSI's part. We'll update this post if we find out.

Athlon 200GE

Pentium Gold G5600

Pentium Gold G5400

Ryzen 3 1300X

Ryzen 3 2200G

Ryzen 5 2400G

TDP

35W

54W

54W

65W

65W

65W

Architecture

Zen

Coffee Lake

Coffee Lake

Zen

Zen

Zen

Process

14nm

14nm++

14nm++

14nm

14nm

14nm

Cores / Threads

2 / 4

2 / 4

2 / 4

4 /4

4 / 4

4 / 8

Frequency Base / Boost

3.2 / -

3.9 / -

3.7 / -

3.5 / 3.7

3.5 / 3.7

3.6 / 3.9

Memory Speed

DDR4-2677

DDR4-2400

DDR4-2400

DDR4-2667

DDR4-2933

DDR4-2933

Memory Controller

Dual-Channel

Dual-Channel

Dual-Channel

Dual-Channel

Dual-Channel

Dual-Channel

Cache (L3)

4MB

4MB

4MB

8MB

4MB

4MB

Integrated Graphics

Radeon Vega 3 (3CU)

UHD Graphics 630

UHD Graphics 610

No

Radeon Vega 8 (8CU)

Radeon Vega 11 (11 CU)

Unlocked Multiplier

No

No

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

MSRP

$55

$86

$64

$124

$99

$160

We're working to learn more, but enabling overclocking on the processor should change its competitive positioning, especially given its $55 price point. The 35W Athlon 200GE drops into motherboards with the AM4 socket and features the Zen microarchitecture paired with the Radeon Vega graphics engine. The processor has two execution cores and four threads, while the integrated Vega graphics engine comes with three Compute Units (CU). The 200GE's Radeon Vega graphics boost up to 1,000 MHz.